Sins

Feeling reassured and in control again, Emerald put her arms round his neck and pressed her body into his, grinding her hips against him as she teased him, ‘Co

me on, you know you want me.’

‘You? No, what I want is this,’ he told her.

She had to take the Courrèges frock off herself; all Max had done was push it up to her waist. He probably wouldn’t even have bothered to take off her knickers either, he was so impatient to have her, Emerald thought triumphantly as she watched in one of the pair of pretty gilt rococo mirrors set into the alcoves either side of the fireplace, her hands braced on the table below it as Max thrust into her.

There would be bruises on her skin in the morning from his hold on her. He was a fiercely demanding lover, but for Emerald there was a sharp sense of excitement in arousing him, pushing him to the point where he had to have her. It proved that she was the more powerful of the two of them.

His thrusts deepened and quickened, selfish just like him, not caring for her or her needs. Had it been like this for her mother and her painter? Had she felt this power and triumph at the knowledge that her bit of rough trade was sweating and gasping over his need to possess her as he drove deeper and harder into her in an act that was raw and savage? No, of course it wasn’t–she could do dirty hot sex far better than her mother, and she wasn’t stupid enough to get pregnant doing it either.

Max was coming, hot spurts of semen pulsing into her.

Emerald pulled a face as he withdrew from her and she turned to face him.

‘I’ll have to go and change,’ she told him.

‘No.’

Emerald’s triumph deepened.

‘Ah, so you want to take me out knowing that I smell of you and sex, do you?’

‘What I want is my dinner,’ Max corrected her, but Emerald was feeling far too pleased with herself to argue with him as she reached for a box of tissues.

‘Look, just let it go, will you? It’s not my fault.’

‘Well, no, of course it isn’t,’ Janey agreed lovingly, as she padded naked round the bed, happy to be with Charlie even if, because he wasn’t feeling very well, he hadn’t been able to ‘do it’.

She hummed to herself as she battled with the transistor radio, finally managing to tune it in to Radio Luxembourg.

They had been supposed to be going to Annabel’s, but when Janey had got to Charlie’s he’d announced that he didn’t feel like going out and had suggested generously that she went without him. Of course she hadn’t done that.

She turned round and smiled at him. All she wanted was to make him happy. When everyone else around her was happy, then she was happy.

She was so very lucky, Janey thought; lucky to have found such a wonderful friend and source of advice and help in Cindy, and then even luckier to have met Charlie, especially after all the years when she had made so many disastrous mistakes with regard to the men in her life. Men who at first had made her so happy, only to break her heart later. Men who had sworn that they loved her, only to prove that it was her love for them and the way she showed it that they had really loved–until something or someone better had come along.

There’d been Alan, the gorgeous poet, with his dark, almost menacing monologues against wealth and status delivered in smoky cafés. Janey had sworn to him that his awkwardly arrhythmic verse was wonderful, whilst secretly finding it incomprehensible, and she’d supported him with discreet handouts of food and money, until the day he had told her that he was giving up poetry to marry a sturdy no-nonsense teacher, who was insisting that he get a proper job.

It had taken her a whole year to get over Alan, but then she had met Keith, a heavy-drinking communist with whom she had attended protest marches and for whom she had risked incurring the displeasure of Her Majesty’s police and justice system.

Keith had turned out to be married to a fellow communist who ‘allowed’ him to have girlfriends so long as he converted them to the cause and they devoted their earnings to it as well. She had got over Keith relatively quickly, thank goodness.

After Keith had been Ray, a struggling playwright suffering under the burden of middle-class guilt. Ray had finally exorcised his guilt via the working-class girl he had made his muse. The two of them were now the darlings of the West End, and hugely bankable.

As Janey had confided to Cindy, she had resolved to give up on men and love after Ray. But then she had met Charlie and, thanks to Cindy’s assurance that Charlie really did love her, Janey had for the first time in a long while felt her old love of life filling her again.

But the best thing of all, as she constantly told Cindy, was that in addition to finding someone who loved her, she had also found her first ever really close friend; someone she could look up to and admire, someone she could turn to when she needed help, someone who did not, as Ella had always done, treat every decision she made with anxious suspicion, but who at the same time did fill the empty space in her life left by her absent ‘big’ sister.

Oh, yes, she was lucky, Janey reflected happily, and from now on she was going to stay lucky–and happy.

* * *

Rose had planned to drop Pete off and then set off back for London without getting out of the car, but somehow or another she found that she had allowed Pete to persuade her to join him for a cup of coffee before she actually left.

The kitchen, though very basic, was, like the bedroom, clean, and the coffee Pete made for her surprisingly good.

It would help her stay alert whilst she was driving back, she decided, but that was the last coherent thought she was able to form because suddenly she realised that characters on the willow-pattern plates on the dresser against the wall were starting to move around. She stared at them and then tried to stand up, subsiding back into the chair when Pete reached for her arm and pulled her back down.